Hinchliffe (2022) cast a strong highlight on the founding fathers of German vocational education, with Kerschensteiner stressing the importance of a focus on the nature of work for developing citizenship. From here, Hinchliffe coined the concept ‘occupational democracy’, as opposed to ‘action-based democracy’. ‘…an “occupational democracy” is premised on the idea that personal self-development best occurs through being part of an occupational pursuit and tradition’ (op.cit., 487). Against potential accusations as being illiberal, Hinchliffe (op.cit., 481) argued: ‘Perhaps it is possible for free individuals of an independent cast of mind to regard themselves as citizens in the service of something bigger than themselves, with responsibilities to match’. Hinchliffe (2022, 485) traced action democracies back to Machiavelli’s Discourses. An occupational democracy he found realised in post-war western Germany. Drawing expressly on Kerschensteiner (1908/2022), Hinchliffe (2022, 281) called the ‘joy of work’ a necessary condition for a persons’ formation, and related it to the ‘joy of belonging to an occupation’. Hinchliffe even used the German word Beruf for occupation and explained (ibid.) that a Beruf supplies persons ‘with that wider context of networks and connectedness that a mere job can never provide’. ‘It is this social connectedness that work can bring about and which gives the individual the feeling that he or she actually counts for something’.

To think of democracy at the workplace may appear somewhat counter-intuitive. Educational research usually regards workplaces as sites of hierarchy and of production and profit-making. Moreover, as Rosvall and Nylund (2022, 16) noted (and this certainly holds not only for Sweden) educationalists and educational researchers have few possibilities to influence what goes on during workplace learning: ‘D[d]ue to the organisation of work placements in Sweden, mentors in those settings cannot be compelled, and may have little motivation, to provide courses or arenas that would enable students to discuss democratic issues at the workplace in a meaningful way’. However, from a labour law perspective, Estlund (e.g.,2003, 13) unfolded the unique potential of the workplace as ‘an especially promising incubator of the bonds of social solidarity and empathy that link the individual citizen to the broader diverse citizenry’. She argued that this potential can be strengthened by corresponding legislative prescriptions, and by trade union activism. This presentation, consequently, investigates a case of workplace learning where, unlike in Sweden and most other countries, a strong legislative regulation exists and where unions play an active role – the German dual system of VET. The presentation attempts to uncover the social relatedness of Beruf learners in Germany, at training sites and beyond, to explore the unique possibilities for democratic education in this context – seeds for an occupational democracy.

To do so, the presentation draws on the conceptual language developed by the British educational sociologist Basil Bernstein. This language permits researchers ‘in one framework… to show the inter-relationships between organizational and knowledge properties, to move from macro- to micro-levels of analysis,[and] to relate the patterns internal to educational institutions to the external social antecedents of such patterns…’ (Bernstein 1977, 112). Like Kerschensteiner/Hinchliffe, Bernstein (2000, xx) claimed that ‘people must feel they have a stake in society’, and also in the school, meaning that ‘not only are people concerned to receive something but that they are also concerned to give something’. Since Hinchliffe (2022), in line with Kerschensteiner, suggests that vocational learners can achieve this feeling of ‘counting for something’ by the social connectedness that work can bring about, the presentation investigates the social connectedness, the learners’ sense of belonging in the dual system, both from the legislative side and from narrations of dual system graduates about their experiences during training. 

To approach the relation between the dual system's legislative regulation and workplace learning regulated by such legislation, this presentation draws on Bernstein’s (2000) four-dimensional concept ‘pedagogic culture’, which Hoadley and Galant (2016) broke down for systematic analyses. The dimensions ‘stability’ and ‘shape’ refer to patterns internal to educational institutions (the classifications (boundaries, established as an outcome of power struggles) and framings (control over the pedagogic interaction)); ‘economy’ and ‘bias’ refer to external social antecedents. ‘Economy’ is about ‘the symbolic, human and material resources of the institution and its location’ (op.cit., 1190), ‘bias’ about ‘the external regulation (e. g., by the state) of the institution...’ (ibid.). This presentation, with its focus on legislative regulation and social connectedness, investigates the bias in Germany’s dual system and its relation to ‘stability’, more precisely, to one of three indicators for ‘stability’, learners’ identity (cf. op.cit., 1189). In a documentary analysis of the Vocational Training Act and subsequent legislation, the presentation shows in what way legal prescriptions aim to influence ongoings in the training company, particularly in terms of curricula and evaluation (the system’s bias). As for the learners’ identity, the empirical basis is 30 problem-centred interviews about experiences during training with dual system graduates, drawn from a 2%-sample of all employed persons in Germany with an oversampling of young people that also included unemployed persons. The respondents graduated approximately five years before the interviews were taken, and during that time, had developed a complicated labour-market entry. In Bernstein-based research, categories such as identity are defined not by empirical descriptions, but with the conceptual tool ‘classification’ or ‘strength of boundary to other objects in the same set’. Leaning on Hoadley and Galant (2016), this presentation proposes: Weak classification or weak boundary to the workplace or the training company means that learners have a more or less strong ‘job’-related identity; strong classification means an orientation towards ‘a wider context of networks and connectedness’, which ‘gives the individual the feeling that he or she actually counts for something’ (Hinchliffe 2022, 281) and thus opens the perspective towards an occupational democracy. With the help of a computer tool, interview narrations concerning colleagues, trainers and other learners, those concerning the training company as such and those narrations that mention external regulations (curriculum (the so-called training regulation) and evaluation) were identified and sorted by classification strength.

This presentation attempts to bring the idea of ‘occupational democracy’ as social connectedness that work and also workplace learning can bring about, closer to the empirical world of vocational education (VET) in Germany with the help of Bernstein’s conceptual language. The documentary analysis reveals the dual system’s ‘bias’, the social partners aiming to influence ongoings in the company, in particular through the ‘training regulations’ with a ‘training Beruf profile’, (in German: Berufsbild; i.e., the ‘vocational skills, knowledge and abilities to at least be imparted in the course of initial training’), a framework curriculum for company transmission, and with examination requirements (s. 5, Vocational Training Act). Interview narrations about examination preparation and those mentioning training regulations may indicate learners’ orientation beyond the local training company. Narrations about relations to trainers, colleagues and other learners may illustrate what Estlund (2003) means when she writes of ‘bonds of social solidarity and empathy’ with people with whom one would not otherwise mix except at work and for the sake of ‘getting a thing done’. Together with narrations about the training company as such, they may indicate a learner’s relation to the workplace or the training company. In sum, the findings will show an illustrative range of potential learners’ identities in Germany’s dual system. Some of them cannot be provided by merely learning to do a job and must, therefore, be termed Beruf-related. Others show democratic effects of working together, as Estlund predicts. Learners’ connectedness to a social world outside the training company is not made explicit or even alluded to in all interviews. Yet the findings show ways of achieving occupational-democratic education through the principle of Beruf in Germany’s dual system.

Bernstein, Basil. 2000. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Revised ed. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, Basil B. 1977. Class, codes and control. Vol 3, Towards a theory of educational transmissions. 2nd ed ed: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977 1980. Estlund, Cynthia. 2003. Working together: how workplace bonds strengthen a diverse democracy: Oxford University Press. Hinchliffe, Geoffrey. 2022. "Citizenship and the Joy of Work." Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (3):479-89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12675. Hoadley, Ursula, and Jaamia Galant. 2016. "Specialization and School Organization: Investigating Pedagogic Culture." British Journal of Sociology of Education 37 (8):1187-210. Kerschensteiner, Georg. 2022. "The school workshop as the basis for the continuation school (1908)." Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (3):399-407. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12670. Rosvall, Per-Åke, and Mattias Nylund. 2022. "Civic education in VET: concepts for a professional language in VET teaching and VET teacher education." Journal of Vocational Education & Training:1-20. doi: 10.1080/13636820.2022.2075436. "Vocational Training Act from 23.03.2005." In.: Federal Law Gazette, Part I No. 20, 31.03.2005.